Spring's a Poppin!

In the 1960s and carrying over into the early 1970s, one of the more popular ways to enjoy looking at photographs of naked men was via 'nudist' or 'natural' magazines. There had been some publications prior to this time period, but by the mid-1960's nudist magazines were able to display male and female nudity without fear of strict government reprisal, thanks to court decisions. Among the decisions, courts had reasoned that individuals could not be convicted of obscenity charges unless the materials depicted “patently offensive hard core sexual conduct.” This meant that many materials dealing with nudity, including magazines, did not qualify as legally obscene.

Health, vitality, fitness, and relative innocence (the models were typically posed in situations that were non-sexual in nature where the only thing missing was clothing) were the hallmarks of most nudity magazines during this period. And while the vast majority of the publications that flourished in this window (between 1950s censorship and explicit hardcore pornography later in the 1970s) was of nude frolicking females, there were also plenty of images including handsome naked men showing their junk. Take for example the cover image for the naturist magazine HUMANA (issue 15, 1967). The models may have been straight, but it's safe to assume that more than a few of the orders that flowed in for these types of publications were from gay men who ignored the ladies and concentrated on the gents. The images in many instances certainly seemed to focus as much on the man as the lady, which makes VGMH aficionados very happy indeed.